“Hard Deadline” or “Soft Deadline”?

Greetings again. I hope you’re doing well.

Researchers can face many writing-related deadlines. There can be deadlines for submitting grant proposals, writing progress reports, revising manuscripts, reviewing proofs, finishing theses, preparing blog posts, and more.

A deadline is a deadline is a deadline, one might think. And, indeed, every deadline should be taken seriously. Experienced researchers, however, often recognize that only some deadlines are absolute.

Examples of absolute deadlines include application deadlines for many grants. If an application for such a grant is even 1 minute late, it may not be considered. The funding source doesn’t care why the application was late.

These absolute deadlines—or “hard deadlines”—have no flexibility. Ideally, applicants are ready early, so they can meet the deadlines even if problems arise.

Some deadlines, however, are slightly flexible. For example, for a decade I edited the magazine Science Editor, which contained mainly invited articles. Of course, I was delighted when articles both arrived on time and were excellent.

Sometimes, though, authors needed a little more time to refine their articles. In those cases, I was willing to allow authors a few more days. Doing so was much better than dealing with articles that had avoidable problems.

“Hard deadline” or “soft deadline”? If in doubt, consider asking in advance. Try to treat all deadlines as hard ones. But if a deadline is a soft one, request an extension if you really need it. Beware of unnecessarily sacrificing quality for promptness.

Until the next post—

Barbara